Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Insights

BTOES From Home - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT : Digital Intelligence – The Journey for the Modern Enterprise.

Written by BTOES Insights Official | Sep 24, 2022 11:30:00 AM

Courtesy of ABBYY's Anthony Macciola, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Digital Intelligence – The Journey for the Modern Enterprise' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at BTOES From Home.

Session Information:

Digital Intelligence – The Journey for the Modern Enterprise

All of your processes play a significant role in the success of your company and your customers. Processes drive engagement between you and your customers externally, and content feeds your internal processes with the necessary insight and context to make decisions.

Session Transcript:

Good afternoon, my name is Anthony Macciola and I'm the chief innovation officer here at abbey we're going to spend our time today discussing how digital intelligence can complement and extend.

Your existing digital transformation initiatives digital transformation is causing organizations to rethink the art of the possible the origins of digital transformation can be traced all the way back to the 2008-2009 time frame when the impact of smartphones started to become apparent within business.

Consumers were becoming accustomed to being able to access information anytime anywhere these expectations started bleeding into how consumers wanted to interact with different entities like their bank their insurance company and even their healthcare providers as a result organizations began to realize the need to redesign their business processes with a primary focus on creating exceptional customer experiences and a secondary focus on increasing operational efficiency it's interesting that all of this nets out to a very familiar focus all around process improvement it's been interesting to watch.

How the digital transformation ecosystem has formed over the past several years organizations have struggled to establish enterprise standards in large part due to the fact that business has been aggressively driving the adoption of technology.

We've seen many instances where the businesses decided to take their destiny into their own hands due to being frustrated with the responsiveness and the expense associated with it the range of tools and platforms available to any organization have greatly expanded based on the objectives and desired outcomes of most organizations at one extreme we have robotic desktop automation tools which are ideal for automating personal desktop tasks from there.

We see organizations using rpa to automate simple repetitive back-office tasks we see organizations expanding their scope and using a variety of systems of engagement capabilities to help automate customer experience through conversation driven engagements we then see the use of intelligent automation tools when organizations are focused on automating end-to-end processes that encompass both customer facing experiences and back office automation last but certainly not least we see line of business applications and historic systems of record maturing and expanding their capabilities to address digital transformation outcomes that fall within their scope.

The underlying theme that transcends the overall ecosystem is democratization the need to broaden the audience of people who can leverage these tools and create their desired outcomes the digital transformation journey comes with a variety of lessons learned.

We're at a point where many organizations are rethinking their approach to process improvement with an eye on accelerating time to value I've highlighted a subset of the challenges we see on a regular basis the circular benefits of optimizing back office operations while transforming customer experience is material and in many cases more significant than many organizations originally anticipated organizations are coming to realize the value of focusing on both at the same time.

You would also think the importance of understanding your environment before taking action would be obvious but that hasn't been the case up until recently many early RPA projects were focused on addressing low-hanging fruit mundane repetitive tasks whose importance or associated business impact was unknown at the time as organizations mature the importance of having insight into their environment plays a crucial role in understanding the impact of a given process along with its costs associated complexities and the impact of any changes in the larger ecosystem more and more organizations are prioritizing process understanding as a prelude to process automation.

That being said the dynamics associated with automating customer facing engagements can result in a different set of priorities and motivations I hear time and time again we're completely rethinking our approach to customer engagement and I really don't care how our processes work today in fact i know they're heavily influenced by how our systems of record work today.

I don't care about any of that i want our customer facing processes designed from the customer's perspective and i want to ensure the best possible customer experience in these cases understanding before acting becomes a lower priority many organizations have been surprised and in some instances caught off guard regarding the dependency their business processes have around content early on many organizations underestimated the need and the complexities associated with leveraging data locked away in their documents and the importance of the information relative to enabling a given business process.

We've heard this dependency can impact as high as 70 percent of the organization's business interactions we've discussed the democratization trend but organizations are truly realizing the need and the benefits associated with enabling the next generation of business analysts smart tech aware business managers and executives organizations expect technology to be simple and easy to use and the business wants to be able to affect their own outcomes democratization empowers a broad audience to participate and contribute to process improvement last but certainly not least organizations have come to realize that the automation technologies.

They're using on their own right aren't going to be enough to deliver their desired outcomes it's easy to conclude that at the end of the day it's all about time to value let's dig a little deeper into the time to value point Gartner recently did two surveys that reinforced the fact that digital transformation is more than just automation process improvement requires operational oversight and insight Gartner is anticipating that 50 of the active dx initiatives will fail to deliver sustainable roi without being combined with other technologies and capabilities.

They also predict that by 2022 80 of the active dx initiatives will derive value from complementary technologies that's the perfect lead into what I want to spend the rest of today's session discussing digital intelligence is emerging as the perfect complement to the existing dx ecosystem it helps organizations improve their operations by increasing the capabilities of their digital workforce and by providing real-time operational oversight and insight.

So let's dig a little deeper and spend some time covering how digital intelligence relates to digital transformation as a c-level exec what if your digital workforce could make smarter decisions quicker from a process oversight perspective what if we could help you optimize future operations based on direct insight to how your existing operations are performing today what if we could help you drive and maintain operational excellence based on continually monitoring your day-to-day operations from a content perspective.

What if we could help your digital workforce unlock actionable information contained within unstructured content and for dx initiatives. that are customer facing what if we could enable you to capture business related content at the edge of your enterprise or at the point of origination our digital intelligence platform allows organizations to complement and extend their digital initiatives let's go into a little bit more detail on each of one of these points we find organizations looking for the ability to discover and understand existing task and process behavior.

We find them looking to understand and measure the impact of their dx initiatives we also see organizations looking for tools to help them discover and automate the creation of tasks and lastly we see them looking for the ability to understand and improve process behavior over time another important aspect of process oversight relates to the ability to anticipate and circumvent negative outcomes which some refer to as protocol violations at the same time.

We see organizations wanting to ensure and enforce positive outcomes again which some refer to as compliance adherence flipping the coin over and looking at content understanding we see organizations looking for solutions to help them automate the transformation of unstructured content into structured actionable data they're also looking for tools to help them eliminate manual data entry or manual data transfer and then to wrap things up as I mentioned earlier for organizations focused on automating customer facing operations.

We find them looking to be able to integrate mobile web-based capture to allow them to capture content from any remote video source the combination of these elements can help expand the capabilities of your digital transformation initiatives and increase the digital intelligence of your dx workforce i want to spend the remainder of our time covering how what we've just talked about is being used in the real world by actual customers.

I'll break the use cases up by customers using us to better understand and monitor critical business processes and by customers using us to help them better understand and process content as part of a larger process merck is a great example of a customer who needed to increase their operational efficiency relative to processing invoices they used us to help process and transform information contained within their invoices and purchase orders.

They wanted to streamline their ap process and improve control in customer service at the same time they wanted to optimize costs so they could reinvest any savings into direct research their implementation involved our technology being used in conjunction with uipath we ended up increasing their operational efficiency which helped them invest more money in research and ultimately resulted in them being able to bring new pharmaceuticals to market quicker here's an example of a large property and casualty company in reviewing their current processes.

The company identified significant variability in their claims process by identifying and remediating claims processing bottlenecks the company was able to realize 30 reduction in their claims processing cycle time thereby approving customer service levels significantly Pepsi wanted to automate their overall invoice capture process and eliminate manual data entry into their corporate sap system they had a number of different entities and they needed to streamline data capture and verification we were able to help them implement invoice processing across five different languages and we were able to help them get to scale within three months of initiating the process here's another example in this case it's a 20 billion dollar global telecom company.

Who wanted to examine their customer service call processes within days they were able to use abby to identify their customer call center was dispatching multiple service trucks for the same service outage we were able to identify process inefficiencies which amounted to over 8 million dollars in annual savings costine is another example of an organization who needed to transform their procure to pay operations as with Pepsi.

They wanted to eliminate manual invoice processing and upskill their finance team this is another example of a customer using us in conjunction with an rpa platform showing how our solutions can be used to complement and extend any automation platform from a result standpoint costane was able to process upwards of 400000 invoices a year with a nine minute reduction in invoice processing time they were ultimately able to achieve eighty percent straight through processing allowing their employees to be freed up to work on higher value work.

My last example is a compliance use case that involves a leading financial services organization with over one trillion dollars under management financial service organizations are required by regulation to conduct risk tolerance analysis of all their investors to determine the investment risk appetite which is subject to audit and compliance risks.

The organization wanted to achieve process efficiencies in their audit reviews ABBYY was deployed to assess the current state of their processes our analysis revealed that 16 ftes were allocated to the audit tasks and they were only able to audit up to 15 of their total transactions by looking at process variations and bottlenecks the organization was able to increase the audit coverage to 100 of their transactions and reduce the fte head count from 16 to 3 allowing them to reallocate freed up resources to higher value activities.

I'm hoping today's discussion provided some insight as to what we're seeing going on in the market and how the emerging value of digital intelligence can complement any digital transformation practice content understanding and process oversight are two sides of the digital intelligence coin and can dramatically expand the capabilities of your digital workforce thank you for your time today and feel free to reach out to us if you're looking to increase the digital intelligence of your organization.

About the Author

Anthony Macciola,
Chief Innovation Officer,
ABBYY.